Wednesday, April 15, 2015

AAD and AFSA: Complicit in the Foreign Service Image Problem

The American Foreign Service has an image problem. It is perceived by the American public and by many in Congress as elitist and out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans. The American Academy of Diplomacy and its supporters and funders in AFSA contribute to the problem by using the term themselves and demonstrating, with remarkable skill, the reason why Americans find them out of touch.

The Foreign Service Act uses the term "elite" to refer not to privilege or rank but to a high level of skill and quality in a certain set of attributes. One of them is the ability to negotiate, often in a foreign language, sometimes in several foreign languages simultaneously. But that is one out of many attributes, and it is the primary skill set required of only a small group of Foreign Service members. By focusing on that group the AAD does indeed appear elitist; and in the process demonstrates how remarkably bad this handful of long-retired ex-ambassadors are at doing what negotiators are supposed to do: framing an argument in terms of the interests of their interlocutors.

The American people don't know what ambassadors do. The average American has never met and never will meet a professional ambassador. And the questions: "Where will the next Pickering come from, or the next Burns," mean nothing to them. They simply demonstrate how out of touch the AAD and AFSA are with the questions that Congress and the American people care about.

And frankly, how out of touch the AAD and their emplaced perpetual AFSA board members, Tex Harris, Tom Boyatt, Ed Marks, and their new errand boy Matthew Asada (for whom they are campaigning like crazy) are with AFSA's own membership- 90 percent of which is not and never will be ambassadors.

Defining the Foreign Service in terms of ambassadors and deputy assistant secretaries and those who serve them defines 90 percent of the Foreign Service as servants. Elite servants. Taxpayer-funded personal assistants and support staff for a small group of people whose work most Americans don't think very much about and whose problems most Americans don't identify with.

It is as stupid a position as defining the military solely in terms of generals or defining a major corporation solely in terms of its chief executive officers. And it is simply not an accurate depiction either of the Foreign Service or of the attributes which FS members bring to the table to an elite level of quality.

Attributes like patriotism, expressed to a degree so strong that, like soldiers, we are willing to leave behind loved ones and our familiar homes, and work to protect and to serve our country in a foreign land.

Attributes like integrity, expressed to a degree so strong that we put country and fellow citizens ahead of the much larger incomes most of us would be earning had we chosen to make our careers in the private sector.

And indeed, attributes like the ability to maneuver easily in foreign cultures, to converse easily in a foreign language, to understand a foreign mindset and deal with foreign bureaucracies, to understand and be able to inform America's leaders about issues like how do terrorists think, how America can do business better overseas, where our national interests coincide with those of others and where they differ, and how to tell a bona fide visitor to America from an intended illegal immigrant or worse.

Those attributes and others unite the vast majority of FS members regardless of skill set. And those attributes are understandable to our interlocutors. The American people understand the skill sets of the majority of FS members far better than they understand the skill sets or motivation of the aging former ex-AFSA presidents and ex-ambassadors longing for their former glory days, who make up the tiny, closed, but self-important, American Academy of Diplomacy.

Most Americans do not know an ambassador. But they know a doctor. They know an IT professional. They know an office manager. They know a logistician. They know a security professional. They know a public relations professional. They know people just like the people who make up most of the Foreign Service.

Instead of funding codes of ethics for ambassadors or even minimal standards for their selection AFSA needs to expend its resources and our union dues to explain to the American people how the unique skill sets of certain people in ordinary and understandable professions unite them into being an elite corps of professionals willing and able to serve America in places like Iraq and Sudan for the good of the American people. If Tex, Ed, Tom and their ilk can't do that then they themselves, and not merely the American public, are unable to articulate what makes the FS elite and why there should be a Foreign Service at all.

Ask not from where the next Bill Burns will come. Ask what the members of the American Foreign Service can do for our country that nobody else can do. Because nobody who had to google Bill Burns cares where the next one will come from.